A quick and dirty RR from last Sunday's race.
Signed up to this as a C race to open the season with and blow the racing cobwebs.
General thoughts
Great feeling to have raced again - haven't done it in anger for pretty much 2 years. Need to find some more small events and sign up, just for the fun of it.
It was COLD! Couldn't feel my feet throughout the bike & run.
Swim - 400m - 6:41
16 lengths in a single lane, with three other folks. Nice and relaxed throughout; came out of the pool fresh as a daisy. Thinking now I maybe should have pushed a bit more, although I'm not sure the time gain vs. the energy spend would have been worth it. Probably not. Still, pretty confident I could have swum it in the 6:20s.
Bike - 23km - 42:51
Figure 8 course, with North loop and South loop, the latter being done twice. Relatively flat, but quite a few "Give way" spots and one hopeless set of traffic lights on an incline over a rail bridge.
Considerably slower than I'd expected, although I was only overtaken by 3 folks on the course, including the overall winner. Probably about 3 minutes or so lost through the aforementioned traffic lights (slowing, waiting, setting off) - I managed to get caught out on both loops, like a numpty.
Pretty windy too - 245W-ish average power, but it only got me about 32kph average speed. There were places where I was all-out and felt like I was barely moving forward. Also noticed I'm erring on the conservative side when it comes to bends / crossroads / etc. - more than I used to before my little off in March. Need to spend more time on the TT bike vs. the road bike to get the confidence back.
Also, it feels like my TT shoes are a bit on the loose side - thinking of swapping them for my regular cycling shoes for Poland to get better power transfer - worth it for middle distance race I think.
Run - 5k (a bit short, actually) - 22:19
3 nice loops in the park. Mostly on paved surface, with a little bit of muddy off-road thrown in.
Not quite the pace I was hoping/planning for (4:47 vs 4:30 min/km), but believe it or not, I think this was actually the first time I've run a sub-5:00 min/km 5k off the bike. Only on the last loop I started to have feeling in my feet though - otherwise it felt like running on pieces of wood.. In hindsight I probably could have pushed more on that third loop to gain time.
Overall: 1:15:01 - mixed feelings about the result (especially the bike split), but happy to have blown the racing cobwebs. There's another one of these in September - planning to take part again and shoot for sub-1:10.